


Ischium

by YoursHopefully



Series: Anachronisms [1]
Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Fluff, Het
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-28 07:19:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/989280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YoursHopefully/pseuds/YoursHopefully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ichabod isn't all angles and awkward movements in the saddle after a lifetime of living in it. </p><p>Or, if you will, the tale of how Abbie Mills found her seat bone and learned the importance of posture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ischium

_Ischium : the dorsal and posterior of the three principal bones composing either half of the pelvis. The seat bone, colloquially._

\---

Years from now, Abbie Mills will be able to pinpoint the exact moment when she made the major fuckup of looking up at Ichabod Crane’s narrow, entreating expression blazing at her from across her kitchen counter and answering “yes” to a very, very, _very_ bad idea that involved muscle strain and one hell of a walk at the close of the adventure.

She didn’t figure a trip to the old Fox Creek place was in her near future, but the both of them are welcome anytime due to small town hospitality and a few favors they've racked up in pursuit of fighting for the greater good. They pull up in her cruiser, the barn freshly whitewashed and a few laborers waving a hello to Lieutenant Mills and “that odd Stork guy” the locals have labeled Ichabod as. The laborers go back to mucking, shoeing, and grooming as they get out of the car.

A wave of not-so-welcome nostalgia hits her when she sees the old barn door still bearing the puckered scar of an axe hit to the wood.

That was a while ago. Horseman on the loose, August’s body prone on the hard packed ground of the stable, and the scent of burnt flesh heavy under her nose. That time has passed. Ichabod, one for remembering the smallest detail, has her wait outside of the stable as he fiddles with the tack.

The saddle is English to the hilt. She gets a look at the quick movements of his long hands moving from buckle to the girth, cinching up spare leather where it falls until the horse is seamless in appearance and _solid_ with the amount of gear it’s clad in. The whole process looks less like routine and more like a dance for him from where Abbie is standing.

Abbie wonders how many times he’s done this, and how well he’s managed in the absence of this routine. Cars are easy. Get in, turn the key. This is a _horse_.

She thinks of cold nights a few centuries back when Ichabod would emerge from a bedroll into the chill of winter in New England, fumbling in the dark with these complex maneuvers that terminated with him sitting high in the saddle with a regiment on the move. For miles, for days, a _lifetime_ spent in transition from one horse to the next.

Ichabod’s firmly in his element, crooning over its _bloodlines_ and _good conformation_ as he brings the big blood bay out into the weak autumn sunlight. The clothes he treats like a tether to his time are back on, tall Hessians buffed to a slick black shine crunching through the debris of leaves and fallen acorns.

Abbie’s in the clothes he declared _practical_. Flannel button up, jeans, and some hiking boots that have been slowly gathering dust in a corner of her walk-in.

“Ready?” he asks her, his expression practically boyish as he makes a catch with his hands. Abbie carefully squirrels into the saddle and wishes for longer legs.

Ichabod mounts up behind her in a smooth economy of motion, riding pillion as he fixes her “seat” and “grip” whilst sliding without any effort at all into an easy pose. Abbie envies his ease – completely comfortable on the bare back of the horse, just beyond the lip of her saddle. She's sure she sits as well as a sack of flour, but at least the sack has a modicum of grace. He guides her heels down and the balls of her feet _up_ on the bars of the stirrups with a few polite nudges, gloved hands twitching her fingers around the leather of the reins to hold firmly, yet loosely.

“Longest time spent in the saddle?” she asks after they’ve comfortably settled into a brisk trot on a cleared forest road.

“Continuous or in terms of a march?” Abbie can hear the murmur of a brook nearby, helping her keep time with the rise and fall of her body as they post.

“Let’s have both.” She marvels at the fact that Ichabod manages without stirrups, his thighs doing the brunt of the work as he falls into rhythm with her and the horse. After two miles, posting is as easy as breathing.

“I spent a day and a night in the saddle without reprieve when I volunteered to courier marked cases. Fort Ticonderoga to Albany in the span of a few days.”

She lets out a whistle of appreciation, ignoring the bloom of heat on the small of her back as his hand coaxes her spine to curve straight once more.

“No slouching, Miss Mills,” he drawls lazily before barreling on with his story. “In terms of a march, nothing as long as Williamsburg to the colony of New York. It was just after I’d arrived, and I can’t say my constitution was agreeing with the colonial climate.”

“It _still_ isn’t,” she grouches, a smile tugging up the corners of her lips.

“My body has simply refused to believe it is the twenty-first century. Thus, I am doomed to a long battle with twenty-first century _organisms_.” He sniffs indignantly. Abbie dissolves into laughter at the memory of the last time he was battling a rather nasty bout with the flu. Germ theory was a fun one to explain. She’d spent enough time holding his hair and what was left of his dignity as Ichabod retched into her toilet bowl. Braided the hair. Practical, but satisfying revenge for when he’d hijacked her cellphone and changed the ringtone to a rousing rendition of _Enniskillen Dragoons_ , a song with a tune even _he_ remembered.

“What exactly am I trying to coordinate here?” she wheezes when he corrects her for the seventh time in an hour.

“Ischium,” is what he draws out in long, flowing syllables. Classically trained, he’s rasped out the complicated Latin and Greek phraseology of many a scientific term during their time on the job. Out of _his_ mouth, they turn out to be less clinical and something more when said in the privacy of her office. Or house. Or saddle, as they are now.

Somehow the Latin comes out as borderline yet innocently phrased innuendo when Ichabod’s long fingers are twined like woodbine to her hips, _coxis_ , or as the press of his thumbs into her hipbones becomes firmer, _os coxae_.

“Ischium?” she tries, butchering the pronunciation with short, rasping breaths. She may be in shape, but this is working muscles she didn’t even know she possessed.

“Find your seat bone, as a colonel once told me while I was learning.”

Abbie ponders the phrase right up until they dismount for a breather half an hour later, loosely hobbling the mare in an overgrown pasture. They amble into the border of old elms and oaks, escaping the heat of the weak sun to let the sweat cool on their faces.

They talk of nothing and everything, making a full circuit around the pasture before he attempts the awkward but smooth swipe at her hand. It's enfolded in the warmth of his glove. He scolds her without words when he cuts a glance sidelong, lifts up her chapped fingers, and _tuts_ in disapproval.

“Forgo your riding gloves and you’ll end up with hands as hard as horn.”

“Gun calluses – remember?” She wiggles the according fingers, and he grazes the rough patches of skin decorating her scarred hands with his mouth. The spark starts, and the slow heat builds with that simple touch.

She isn’t sure who starts it. But she knows it’s her that's going to finish it when she crowds him into the copse of woods and straight into the low hanging boughs of an old oak, her mouth slanted across his own as he stoops to make up for the difference in height. The usual remedy is employed when she hitches a leg around his hips, angling herself up against the higher ground of the tree as he bends to meet her halfway.

It could go on forever and she wouldn’t mind. His tongue flicks shyly into her mouth, _still so proper_ , like an invitation until she lays a hand on the back of his neck and bids him _harder_. When he breaks off, his mouth swollen and hair mussed from her hands curling into it, she sees the very dangerous gleam of Ichabod Crane “getting a notion” in his head.

The snap of her jeans divides cleanly between his long fingers. His boot heels are crunching into the loamy ground below before she can find her voice. Then her jeans are bunched around her knees like a very welcome vice to hold her in place and his inscrutable gaze is on the flat plane of her stomach and the lines of her thighs. Abbie equates it to a look of reverence.

It took years to force an actual “Abbie” out of his starchy forms of address. Now she coaxes the name out of his mouth at will. Whether it be in the closed space of their shared office or in the dark of her living room, the space between them a bare sliver of heat and whatever noise they’ve got running on the television drowning out their sounds.

“Christ, Ichabod, we’re in the _woods--"_

He’s muttering about how her “profane phraseology offends _every_ sense” against the skin covering a sharp hipbone. Whatever she was going to say is drowned out when his tongue teases at her clit through the filmy lace of her panties. All arguments die a good death and are filed away for later in her mind.

She’s barely fishing a leg out of her jeans before her last pair of bikini cuts, may they live in infamy, are tugged off with a sharp snap of breaking elastic. The red mark it leaves on the join of her thigh and pelvis smarts enough to make her hiss, but Ichabod has her complete and undivided attention when his tongue glides over the red line. He follows it like a trail before his lips nudge into the soft cleft of her sex and form some unspoken syllable around her clit, drawing it between teeth and tongue.

Certain that she’s experiencing either a religious moment or dying on the spot, she’s left to scramble for a purchase somewhere. Hooks her leg over his shoulder to anchor him there, pressing at the back of his head for _more_ since the ability to ask verbally has checked out. It’s a slow cadence of pressure and heat – she’s convinced he’s made a study of this.

Abbie’s perception of things narrows down to the strain in her thighs and the rigidness of her fingers twined in his hair, Ichabod’s queue coming loose as she yanks strands loose to float around his face. Long fingers probe between the lips of her cunt, twining inward to hitch and curve until she’s screaming loud enough to scare an owl out of a neighboring tree.

She trembles on the aftershocks of a hard climax that she’s _still_ not quite registering fully, her nipples tight peaks and sore against the soft shells of her bra. He’s made a study of this – dead certainty of that. Ten forms and functions to shut down Abbie Mills and her nervous system. She feels the blunt tips of his beautiful fingers coast along the curve of her bottom, catching on a thigh to splay her legs, opening her to the cool air.

The sight of his mouth red from the cold and slick with _her_ is enough to compel her knee to hike up, shoving clumsily until they’re both a pile of clothing and limbs on the forest floor.

Her fingers still scramble with the damn mystery that are Ichabod’s _falls_ which took an hour of scholarly explanation on her couch to figure out, flushed from groping at one another for a solid hour when she first started to tear at his knee breeches. That, however, was last year’s happening.

Since then, Abbie has coaxed him into breaking the convention that sex can happen between two unmarried parties and still mean something. She’s coaxed him to believe that _yes, Ichabod, there is a magical pill that prevents pregnancy at a ninety-nine percent rate of success._

She’s coaxed him through Katrina’s end and the long mourning that followed.

Abbie Mills has coaxed Ichabod Crane into more situations than she can count. But the most beautiful thing she can coax from this man is the sound of her name on his lips when she manages to get her damn hand down his breeches and fist his cock with a few dry, perfunctory strokes.

The tables flip, and she’s the one guiding the pace, the rhythm, the cadence. The slow cant of her hips as she takes him into her body, a hand pinning him as he twists on the leaves below her. His hands don’t know where to go at first, coasting over the curve of her hips, the swell of a breast beneath her flannel, finally settling on her ass to _grip_ as both of them fall into order.

Wet enough to where each thrust sounds obscenely loud, Abbie feels the flush creep down to her neck. Ichabod mirrors it tenfold, but it stains his skin clearly as it ebbs into the flesh covered by his coat.

She draws out on a whine as every inch of her becomes nothing but raw nerves, flayed and open as the blunt pad of his thumb traces her clit. It doesn't take long. Everything is primed in her body to react to a glance from him, the smell of old leather and cloves, and the heat of his body between her thighs. Her world tips into something filled with color, sounds amplified, and the pulse in her sex keen enough to make her nails scrape indentations into the ground below.

Ichabod is unerringly quiet in these moments, soft chuffs of breath, strained exhales, and maybe a groan if she’s lucky. But now, his voice quavers on her name as he loses it, face tucked into the curve of her neck as he rears up against her and clutches her hips to slow the frantic beat – everything stills. It’s just the slow tic of heat and the press of his cock into her body as he comes, ragged noises almost animal in nature drawn from his throat when Abbie’s nails cut into his clothed ass to draw him flush against her.

The both of them manage to collect themselves minutes later and slump against the solidness of the mossy oak, twining together among the gnarled roots of the tree.

“Old as you, maybe?” she teases him, patting the bark above his head for emphasis. That earns her a pinch on her rear, which dissolves into a good natured elbowing as she twists in his lap, wincing at the sight of come slick on her thighs and the soreness that’ll remind her of this for _days_ fluttering just below the surface of her skin.

They scramble back into their clothing as the fall chill sets in. Abbie slides between his legs and sits back against him, tucking her hands into the loose folds of her sleeves.

“Did the horse watch?” she manages to scrape out, her vocal cords wrung thin. The humor in her tone isn’t dulled one bit.

Ichabod gives her a quizzical glance without opening his eyes as she looks over her shoulder at him. His brow juts up and an arm catches around her middle as he tucks her head under his chin. He strips the gloves free from his hands to cover hers instead, twice as big and loose, but warm and fleecy. 

Abbie has learned it's best to just let the gentlemanly conduct slide. It's Ichabod being Ichabod, and that's enough to make her happy. She adjusts her breathing to match the slow rise and fall of his chest and knots a hand in his. They become one being like that, joined and cohesive as the sun loses itself behind a cloudbank and the day becomes dusk.

“I think the mare has hobbled back to the stables already,” he supplies a while later in a low murmur. Of course, Ichabod’s assessment is proven correct after Abbie manages to lift her head high enough to look at the field beyond the copse of trees they’re tucked into. No horse.

“Hope you still know how to walk a couple of miles in those.” She looks pointedly at the Hessians propped up on a rock as they lounge. Ichabod’s narrow frame shifts under her as he hikes a knee up, heel sinking into the soft loam.

“There are a few valued things in this world which a body remembers without any effort at all,” he comments, a flush rising in his cheeks as he cups her chin, turning her face towards his own. Abbie can feel both of their mouths curving into characteristic grins against each other, and the pair lose themselves in time, in the forest, in the fall, and in the moment.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to thank my internet life partner, Rachel, for being a beautiful, bodacious beta! 
> 
>  
> 
> [The Enniskillen Dragoons tune in question.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geNyk3w90O4)
> 
>  
> 
> [My Tumblr](http://sassylemur.tumblr.com/)


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